


sullen as a sunken ship (and twice as cold)

by KatieBirdie



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (they all show up in time), AU, Friendship, Gen, despite the tone of the title it wont be that angsty, mermaid!lance, secret keeping, still set in space tho
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2020-01-05 19:29:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18372590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KatieBirdie/pseuds/KatieBirdie
Summary: In which Lance Mclain is a merperson, and he'd really like to keep that fact under wraps, thanks.He's not going to, obviously.





	1. Chapter 1

Here’s a fun fact about Lance Javier McClain: for almost all of his natural life, he’s had a tail instead of legs.

 

And here’s another fun fact, while we’re at it: he has been walking around on legs for around 6 months now, and it was really starting to piss him off. 

 

Look, on the surface, he gets it. One of the more well known aspects of space was its general lack of seas, or even just some nice lakes. It would make sense, then, that there wouldn’t be many places to take a quick dip. But the Garrison was in the middle of the fucking  _ desert _ , which was equally known for its lack of seas, and he had made due with the jacuzzi bath in the teacher’s “secret” bathroom and a mineral tablet. In the Castleship, though? Things were a bit harder, because apparently Alteans had never heard of a bath. Nope, it was just showers for hours and hours; miles and miles. Not a bathtub in sight. And it wasn’t like he could take a pit stop at some local planet, because even if there magically was one that had the same chemical balance as the ones on Earth, he’d still have to take someone else with him, which would defeat the entire point, now wouldn’t it?

 

(And don’t even get him started on the fucking  _ pool. _ Just--why? Why would you put a goddamn pool on the ceiling. Sure, the Castleship was made by shape-shifting aliens, but that doesn’t excuse it. Why grow wings or tree frog hands or whatever they would do to get to the water if you could just  _ have the pool in the floor _ . Great Empresses, he’d never get over that, what the fuck.)

 

So yeah, he wasn’t really in the best of moods these days. The sea longing was easy enough to hide, he had been doing it for years now, after all, but he knew that as the days (nights? doboshes? space time was weird.) went on his temper would get ever shorter, and that wasn’t exactly ideal when stuck in a spaceship with 9 people all saving the known universe. Which meant that either he need to find a nice, solitary bath— an increasingly unlikely idea— or he would have to tell someone the biggest secret he had, one that everyone in his family had been forbidden to reveal to humans, to a human. To put it shortly, he was stuck between a rock and a dry place.

 

Staring up at the ceiling of his room, Lance began to catalog his options. Hunk, despite his status as Lance’s best friend, was out immediately. His best bud was great at a lot of things, but keeping secrets absolutely, positively  _ was not _ one of them, especially a secret like, “I’m actually not a human at all, but actually a merperson who was suppose to be learning everything I could about your space knowledge incase our plan to reintegrate with humans went south. Also, magic is real.”

 

Yeah, no. Keith was definitely out of the picture too, both because Lance was a petty person at heart and owned that fact, but also just because Keith was impulsive as hell and would probably spill everything to their enemies the minute they made him mad. So, strike two. Neither Shiro or Allura would work either, they both would probably go full “Teamwork Is  _ Important _ , Lance, So You Must Tell Everyone” mode, which, yes, he understood the importance of teamwork on several levels— he had six whole siblings,  _ of course _ he understood how important getting along with other people could be, if he hadn’t their house would have become collateral damage in weeks. All the same, though, he couldn’t help but think that there was a very big difference between getting along well enough with someone to smash some robot aliens’ heads in together and telling them that, hey, you were part of a secret civilization and not even human this whole time. 

 

All that were left were Pidge and Coran. They were both the best options, but there were still problems. Coran, for all Lance knew, might pull the same teamwork card as Allura would; he was her subject and advisor, after all, and for all Lance liked him he didn’t actually know Coran very well. Pidge… Pidge could definitely keep a secret, she had fooled a military facility, for Wailers’ sakes, and she could probably just build a bathtub if she wanted to, but Lance couldn’t help but be a bit leery. His mother and teachers had stressed that scientists were the worst people to find out about the secret— after all, they were the type who would stop and ask  _ questions _ . Best case, they would blow the whole plan wide open, worst case, though, meant  _ experimentation. _ Lance shuddered at the mere thought.

 

He knew that Pidge wouldn’t ever do anything to actually harm him— she was a bit mean at times, but she wasn’t cruel. But, well, conditioning was hard to break, even when it was well-meant. 

 

A week, he decided. He would give himself a week, and if he couldn’t find a workable solution by then, he would tell Pidge. With the bones of a plan in place, he finally put on his headphones, and tried his best to fall asleep.

 

———————————————————————————————————————

 

Lance had been acting weird. 

 

Pidge hadn’t noticed at first, mostly because living in an alien spaceship meant she had a lot to keep her attention focused elsewhere, but now that she was taking a moment to look, there was definitely something off about him these past few weeks. Normally she would have brushed it off as homesickness rearing its ugly head, but she had seen Lance homesick back at the Garrison, and this most definitely did not match. At the Garrison, it manifested as him bothering her and Hunk even more than usual, as though he was trying to substitute their presence for his family’s. Whatever was going on with him now, however, had him withdrawing instead, choosing to wander into the far reaches of the Castleship without company, turning down anyone’s offers to go with him with some lame quip. Deflection, she suspected. 

 

But what was there to deflect? Pidge was a scientist at heart, always had been, and there was nothing more she hated than a mystery, and Lance’s sudden change of behavior certainly counted as one. It hadn’t gotten too out of character for Lance yet— at least, not enough to raise the alarms for anyone else in the Castleship, he was still chattering and joking around when he was near the rest of them— but she had never been the patient type, and she wanted an explanation quick.

 

But not quick enough to actually want to go up and ask him point blank about it. People, she had found, tended to be very touchy about someone questioning why they were doing something, even when the questioner was very polite about it. So unless things got dire, fast, Pidge would probably have to go the observational route. No big deal, really, she had always been good at multitasking, though it did mean she’d likely have to follow him around a bit. Ugh. For an answer, she’d do it, no matter how annoying it would be to abandon her work to trace Lance’s steps.

 

Satisfied with her new course of action, Pidge turned back to the device on her lap. It had been a gift from a newly-freed planet, a hologram-projecting cube that had a fascinating set up inside of it. By her estimates, she had a couple of hours to work on figuring it out before heading to bed and getting enough sleep to be functional in the morning. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> does anyone even care about this fandom anymore? eh, whatever.  
> this is my first go at writing a fanfic (despite reading a ton lmao) so, uh, dont expect to much of a schedule here.  
> ciao for now!


	2. Chapter 2

    Maybe the Dark Empress was finally smiling down on him, or maybe the star spirits truly could end up out into the far, far reaches of space like his father always insisted and were taking pity on their distant ancestor. Whatever the source of his sudden luck, Lance was willing to break out the good paper the next time he made an offering, because mysteriously, miraculously, Team Voltron was headed straight to a planet uncolonized by the Galra, hellbent on getting some negotiations going, two days into Lance’s search to keep his fishy bits unknown to Pidge. Not any uncolonized planet mind you, no, this was an uncolonized planet that, according to his darling Blue, had the closest match to Earth’s oceans this side of the galaxy.

    Clearly, Lance had hit the _jackpot._

    ...Well, not completely. Because according to the Princess, drifting around in the reaches of space not yet touched by Galraian paws was not, in fact, a good reason to take a bit of a vacation, but instead meant they were doubling down on training. Long, grueling, boring training. It wasn’t like they were practicing new fighting moves, or anything; no, they were mostly running laps and lifting weights— the sort of things they had been doing back on Earth. It was, in a word, _fucking_ _awful._

    Lance had just finished his round of weight lifting and was lounging— as well as one could lounge against a cold, metal wall while itching badly enough to make a mosquito wince in sympathy— with a water pouch in hand, contemplating how weird the others might find it if he dumped it onto his face instead of drinking it, when Pidge plopped down next to him.

    “This better not be some prank,” he wheezed, immediately suspicious. Pidge hated training, even back at the Garrison, and that had been much lighter. If she was going to take the effort to move at all after Allura’s terrifying idea of a workout, it definitely wouldn’t be to simply talk to him. 

    “S’ colder over here,” was her grunted reply. She then flopped bonelessly onto her back, eyes closed. Lance watched her with narrowed eyes, waiting for the other shoe to drop, but she neither said nor did anything else, so he cautiously returned his attention to his water pouch. It would definitely be a bit weird, he decided. Not _that_ weird, but just weird enough that Allura or Shiro would get on his case, and he would prefer to keep their attention off of him for the time being. So instead he took another swing of water and thought wistfully about the days back at the Garrison when he could claim a date with some female peer and take a dip instead. Or, better yet, when he didn’t have to dress up in a skintight, latex-esque alien undersuit while dealing with dryscale.

    Empresses, he itched. If anyone were to ask him, he’d say with certainty that dryscale was the absolute, no-holds-barred, _worst_ part about going so long apart from the sea. The spell-stitching did what it could to keep his body clearly human, but that didn’t mean his body was just going to go along with it. In theory, dryscale only happened to merpeople who spent time out of the water while still fishy from the waist down, but theory didn’t account for the fact the Lance would be stuck out in space for at least 6 months, surrounded by weird space magic that probably wasn’t helping matters. 

    Yeah, space magic. Allura and Coran could call it Quintessence all they wanted, Lance knew magic when he felt it, and that was _magic_ , goddammit _._ Honestly, that almost had been the most frightening part about the start of their whole galaxy-defenders’ beginnings— if the Alteans were anything like his people, they’d have magic sensors scattered about, just in case. His mother was the paranoid type— she had to be, considering her high-up position— and insisted on all her children’s spell-stitchings having more than the standard magic masking than most, but still Lance had fretted. What if the Alteans noticed he had quite a bit more magic than the others? What if the healing pods somehow undid the stitching and returned him to his tailed, obviously aquatic form? But neither Allura or Coran mentioned anything or even gave him a doubtful side-eye, and he popped out of the pod unscathed (in multiple senses), so Lance very slowly allowed his worries to ease. 

    Speaking of Allura and Coran — a quick glance at the room let him know that Allura was occupied in conversation with Shiro as he effortlessly held a dumbell-like thing Lance had struggled to heft up two-handed with his single non-prosthetic arm. Curse that man and his unbeatable strength. Coran, meanwhile, was doing… something in the control room above, where the training robots were usually programmed. Sure that they weren’t going to turn their attention on him, and knowing that Pidge would have no reason to notice, he tapped out a quick little rhythm on his leg’s armor, and bit back a sigh of relief as the itching receded a smidge. It was still under his skin at his neck and sides, but temporary relief was better than none, and he couldn’t afford anything flashy with the two only other magical beings so close. Now equipped with a clearer, less distracted mind, he slumped further against the wall and tried to get some actual rest a bit before the next set of exercises.

    (Unbeknownst to Lance, at the same moment he felt the magic flow over him, Shiro, only a few feet away, jolted as a cold, heavy pressure shot through his galrain arm. He muttered a few reassurances to the concerned Princess as he glanced around the room. What the hell had _that_ been?)

* * *

 

    After the brutal practice the Princess had put them through, the very last thing Pidge wanted to do was stalk her fellow paladin as her wandered around the dusty, unoccupied parts of the Castleship, but that was _exactly_ what she was doing. It was a shame this whole following-Lance-around thing was sort of a secret for now, because with this until her belt it could never be said Pidge Holt didn’t keep her fucking promises. 

    These were the thoughts that went through her head as for the third time in three days Pidge watched Lance wander back out of yet another room in a hall full of them, impatiently looking for any change in demeanor. Nope— same vaguely annoyed expression he had worn for the last five rooms in this part of the Castleship. Silently huffing, she sat down, legs criss-cross-applesauce, at the end of the hall and prepared for a boring hour. Very quietly, mind you, because while her new body cloaking device was working _fabulously_ , in her opinion, she hadn’t yet figured out how to silence any noise she made yet. Aggravating, but could be worked on. If nothing else, she could claim she was merely testing out her new invention should Lance somehow still notice she was here. 

    Maybe she should take Coran up on those meditation books he had mentioned while waiting for Lance to do something of interest, so she wouldn’t miss anything— because despite her sour attitude, Pidge could admit that these little… excursions had led to some interesting information. For one, Lance was definitely searching for something, as he always looked through each room on a floor before leaving, and never going back once he had gone through the entire place. What, exactly, he was looking for Pidge hadn’t figured out though; at first she had assumed he was maybe looking for new clothes, having tired of just switching between his Earth clothes and his Paladin armor, but he had barely given the storage rooms he found a glance, peaking in and ignoring them after that. The other rooms he ignored weren’t helping either, all of them a jumble of old bedrooms, bathrooms, dining areas, recreational rooms, ballroom-eqse areas, and rooms with no real distinguishing features. The only room Lance had seemed to find interesting was one that probably once was a tailor’s workspace, which he took a set of embroidery thread and needles from. Pidge had several questions about that moment, ranging from _Alteans still had tailors at that point?_ to _Lance knows how to sew and/or embroider?_ but she kept them to herself for the time being, since that clearly wasn’t what Lance was searching for. 

    For second and third, watching Lance while he thought he was alone gave her a glimpse into some weird behaviors she had never seen him display in front of the other Paladins. He scratched at his neck. A lot. The sides of his stomach too, but that was nowhere close to how often he would suddenly stop in the middle of a doorway to scratch at his throat. At first, Pidge had thought maybe he had some rash, like eczema, but she had gotten plenty of good looks at his neck during training and simple hanging out time, and there was nary a rough patch or even a pimple to be seen. (In truth, if she hadn’t become intimately familiar with Lance’s skincare routine after hearing him chatter about it both in the Garrison and after becoming Paladins, Pidge probably would have been deeply jealous of his skin. How dare it be so clear even with the stresses of fighting evil space cats on the regular. As it was, she thought it was a lot of time spent rubbing things into your face with a level of consistency she herself simply did not possess. Whatever made him happy, she supposed.) 

    Which led her to her next point: Lance sang to himself. That in of itself wasn’t weird, obviously. Everyone did that, including herself. It’s what he sang that Pidge found weird. Now, Pidge wasn’t going to claim that a couple of years of Spanish made her an expert in the language or anything— she was a white girl, but not _that_ kind of white girl. What she would claim, however, was that it gave her a good idea of what Spanish sounded like in general, and whatever language Lance was singing to himself in was, it sounded _nothing_ like Spanish. It wasn’t nonsense either, mind you. What little she had able to hear clearly when he walked closer to her hiding spot was full of the sort of consistency of an actual language, repeating certain sounds and phrases in ways you would any other song in any language.  So what the hell was it? Not English or Spanish, obviously. Samoan, maybe? She had heard Hunk mutter it to himself more than once while working on Altean tech together— apparently, he found it easier to talk himself through an experiment than with English, which, sure, Pidge could roll with it. She could she Hunk teach Lance songs in Samoan pretty easily.

    But wouldn’t have Lance brought something like than up by now? No, scratch that, he _absolutely_ would have brought that up by now. Not only was Hunk the one person Lance loved to talk up just about as much as he did himself, but Pidge could also distinctly remember the whole team having an impromptu discussion about earth songs compared to Altean ones not too long ago, resulting in each of them sing some old favorites, some in other languages. Why not bring it up then?

    Unless… no, that couldn’t be it. The Princess and Coran would have had to have noticed something like that, right? She gave a searching look to Lance, who was paused at another of the endless doorways, examining a tapestry-blanket thing and scratching absently at his side. Could he be—

    This required further data; evidence far more concrete than her current lurk-and-observe methods were giving her. Setting her jaw, Pidge stood up as silently as she could and made her way down the hallway, destination in mind. It seemed it was time to pull a Hunk and invade some privacy. 

    (Lance glanced up from his odd find at the sound of footsteps echoing down the hall. No one appeared, even as the footsteps went farther down to the stairway he had come from. Weird. He was almost tempted to call another Paladin about it in case it was some Galrain bullshit, but then remembered that the only other people nearby were a planet still stuck roughly in their equivalent of the Renaissance. So instead he filed it under the mental folder of “Ghosts, probably” and went back to trying to figure out what in the actual hell the scene sewn onto the cloth was supposed to represent.)

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes, i'm posting this and 3 in the morning. no, you're not allowed to judge me for it.  
> anyway! we have pidge and lance povs again, plus a cameo from shiro! lance complains, pidge investigates, and no one directly communicates with each other because that's for losers. so like the actual show, basically. i swear they'll get better in time
> 
> ps. this isn't beta read so go easy on me


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